The Composition of Verb Meanings

该提案概述了PI和Malka Rappaport Hovav教授（以色列Bar Ilan大学）联合开展的一项正在进行的研究计划的新阶段。 它的长期目标是发展一种理论，即一种语言的使用者对他们语言中的动词有什么样的了解，从而使他们能够正确地使用和理解。 PI以前的研究，其中大部分是NSF支持的，揭示了这种知识是高度结构化的，一般原则可以让说话者从动词的含义中确定动词的语法行为。这一早期的研究也导致了动词意义的语法相关元素的识别，从而为动词意义的构成理论的发展奠定了基础，这也是本研究的目标。 这样一种理论必须明确动词意义的确切组成部分，支配这些组成部分组合成动词意义的形式表示的原则，以及将这些表示与适当的句法结构联系起来的原则。 本研究结合前人的研究成果和新的句法-语义界面的实证研究：常规动词一词多义的探索，探讨动词意义的构成。 在英语中，某些动词显示了一系列的含义（例如， sweep可以描述活动，如 特里扫了地板，移走了特里扫走了人行道上的树叶，或者放上了 特里把树叶扫到阴沟里）;这种现象是有规律的，因为动词的整个语义类别都表现出相同的一词多义模式（例如，表面接触动词rub和wipe模式，如 sweep）。 常规动词一词多义被选为研究领域，因为初步的研究表明，它是一个丰富的洞察动词意义的来源，但这一现象仍然缺乏广泛的，系统的文件。 本项目将通过几个详细的基于语料库的词汇多义艾德案例研究来填补这一空白。这些案例研究将需要记录证明类型的动词意义的变化，揭示动词一词多义的规律，并确定可能的动词一词多义的限制。 研究结果将被用于制定一个明确的理论的组成动词的含义，可以预测的范围内的含义，一个给定的动词可以展示。 对动词一词多义现象的研究有助于我们更深入地理解动词意义的本质。 这项研究是特别及时的，因为在最近的语言学文献动词多义，虽然没有得到很好的理解，一再被认为是承担之间的选择两个竞争的理论模型的动词意义，拟议的研究，通过阐明的phonomenon本身的性质，应有助于解决这一争议。 由于一词多义现象一直是词典编纂者、计算语言学家、心理语言学家和儿童语言习得研究者们的难题， 这项研究的结果对理论语言学界以外的研究人员也应该是有价值的。

This proposal outlines a new stage in an ongoing research program being carried out jointly by the PI and Professor Malka Rappaport Hovav (Bar Ilan University, Israel). Its long-term aim is the development of a theory of what speakers of a language know about the verbs of their language that allows them to be used and understood properly. The PI's previous research, much of it NSF-supported, revealed that this knowledge is highly structured and that general principles could allow speakers to determine a verb's grammatical behavior from its meaning. This earlier research also led to the identification of grammatically-relevant elements of verb meaning, thus laying the groundwork for the development of a theory of the composition of verb meanings -- the goal of the proposed research. Such a theory must make explicit the exact components of verb meanings, the principles which govern the combination of these components into formal representations of verb meanings, and the principles that associate these representations with the appropriate syntactic structures. This project investigates the composition of verb meaning by combining previous research results with insights derived from new empirical studies of the syntax-semantics interface: explorations of regular verbal polysemy. In English certain verbs show a range of meanings (e.g., sweep can describe an activity as in Terry swept the floor , removing as in Terry swept the leaves off the walk , or putting as in Terry swept the leaves into the gutter ); this phenomenon is regular in that entire semantic classes of verbs show identical patterns of polysemy (e.g., the surface contact verbs rub and wipe pattern like sweep ). Regular verbal polysemy has been chosen as the research domain because preliminary studies show it to be a rich source of insights into verb meaning, yet extensive, systematic documentation of this phenomenon is still lacking. This project will fill this gap through several detailed corpus-bas ed case studies of verbal polysemy. These case studies will require documenting attested types of variations in verb meaning, uncovering regular patterns of verbal polysemy, and identifying constraints on possible verbal polysemy. The findings will then be used in the formulation of an explicit theory of the composition of verb meanings that can predict the range of meanings that a given verb can exhibit. The proposed investigations into verbal polysemy will provide a deeper understanding of the nature of verb meaning. This study is especially timely since in the recent linguistics literature verbal polysemy, although not well-understood, has repeatedly been argued to bear on the choice between two competing theoretical models of verb meaning; the proposed research, by illuminating the nature of the phonomenon itself, should contribute to the resolution of this controversy. Since polysemy has proved a vexing problem to lexicographers, computational linguists, psycholinguists, and researchers in child language acquisition, the results of this research should also prove valuable to researchers outside the theoretical linguistics community.